About Erich Neumann

The youngest of three children, Neumann was born in 1905, in a Jewish section of Berlin. He was raised in a secular, affluent family, yet felt a strong affinity for Judaism. As a teenager, he became an ardent Zionist, inspired too by Martin Buber’s stylized writings on Hasidism as a pathway for Jewish spiritual renewal. “I feel God in everything…,” young Neumann wrote in his diary, “I feel it in my essence that my ancestors must have had an intimate selectness with God for thousands of years. All Jews must (still) have that.” 

By the age of sixteen, young Neumann had already begun forging a Jewish identity for himself. He joined a Jewish debating society, which discussed philosophy and politics, and privately studied modern Hebrew. Upon graduating from gymnasium in 1923, Neumann enrolled at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, where he took courses in education, philosophy, psychology, the history of art and literature, and Semitic studies. He was especially drawn to Martin Buber's writings on early Hasidism, and its spiritual and psychological importance for the contemporary world. Upon receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1928, Neumann enrolled in medicine at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University with the goal of a psychiatric career. That same year, he married Julie Blumenfeld, a Zionist activist and nurse. 

Coincidentally, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was an officially visiting student at Friedrich Wilhelm University during 1928-1930--and it’s fascinating to speculate if Neumann ever met the future Lubavitcher Rebbe due to their mutual interests in Hasidic thought. Clearly, however, Buber’s writings were still intellectually vital to Neumann, and the two exchanged correspondence in the early 1930s concerning his unpublished essay on Franz Kafka’s surrealist fiction. Buber warmly wrote, “Your clear and precise methodology does remarkable justice to some of (Kafka’s) references and contexts.”

 
Martin Buber (left) and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (right).

Neumann finished his medical coursework in 1933, while also pursuing Kabbalah and Hasidism at the University of Berlin. However, soon after Hitler came to power, Jewish medical students were barred from internships and thereby prevented from gaining licensure. Unlike many of their Jewish compatriots, he and Julie sensed that events would get much worse under the Nazis--and they departed Germany with their toddler son, Micha, to settle permanently in Tel Aviv in 1934. 

At the time, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler were the most celebrated psychological thinkers in the world--each with sizable international professional and lay followings. Their public statements on cultural, social, and even political matters were eagerly sought by European and American newspapers, and read by millions of people. 

 Carl Jung and Alfred Adler.

 Both Adler and Jung had originally been the most venerated members of Freud’s inner circle based in Vienna, but first Adler (in 1911) and then Jung (in 1913) had decisively broken with Freud due to his over-riding emphasis on sexuality in the human psyche. 

Jung’s more optimistic writings on personality growth (which he called “individuation”) as well as mythology and symbolism appealed to Neumann. As a result, he studied with Jung for eight months before joining Julie and their infant son Micha in Tel Aviv. 

 
1909 Clark University, Massachussetts. 

Front row L-R: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung.

Rear row: L-R: Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi.

There Neumann became an analytic therapist and an independent scholar whose influential books included The Origins of Consciousness, Depth Psychology and the New Ethic, and The Great Mother.  Because Neumann held no academic position and most of his Israeli colleagues were loyal Freudians, he was isolated professionally.  However, along with the Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem whom he knew collegially, Neumann in the late 1940s-1950s became an esteemed presenter at the prestigious Eranos conferences held annually in scenic Asconia-Moscia, Switzerland. 

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was a Dutch mythographer, theosophist, and scholar. She founded the annual Eranos Conference in 1933, after strong encouragement from Carl Jung, whom she met in the late 1920s. Both shared a deep interest in symbols, mystical experience, and world religions. Jung was its leading figure for nearly 20 years, until ill health caused his withdrawl. 

20 years.    

 
Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

Neumann had a keen interest in the Kabbalistic view of the human soul, typically described as comprising 10 divine emanations in an array known as the Tree of Life. He was also drawn to the legends and mystical outlook of early Hasidism, founded by Israel ben Eliezer (c. 1698-1760), known as the Baal Shem Tov ("Bearer of the Good Name" in Hebrew).

Neumann was also influenced by the mystical teachings of the Safed "school" of the Kabbalah, which flourished in the mid-sixteenth century. It was led by Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572), who posited the nature and destiny of the human soul. This is a stylized picture of the setting. 

Drawing by Lionel Reiss (My Models were Jews, Gordon Press, 1938). 

A quiet man devoted to Julie (who also became a psychotherapist in Israel) and their two children (daughter Rali had been born in 1938), Neumann turned down an offer in the mid-1950s to direct the newly-established psychology clinic at Tel Aviv University. Rather, he preferred to maintain his scholarly lifestyle--even refusing to own a telephone in an effort to minimize distractions. Their two-bedroom apartment on Gordon Street had a balcony overlooking the sea; and he felt continually inspired by the natural beauty of Israel. 

Neumann began writing The Roots of Jewish Consciousness in 1934. His goal was to apply concepts from the Kabbalah and early Hasidism to create a new model of personality structure and growth. It was a bold, unprecedented project in the history of modern psychology. All through the 1930s and World War II, Neumann worked dutifully on the dual manuscript.     But after finally completing it in 1945, he decided not to publish this eleven-year labor of love for reasons that are historically unclear. From the later recollections of Neumann’s family and friends, it seems that Gershom Scholem persuaded him that the work was too weak in its Judaic sources to be released. It’s also likely that Neumann felt that Roots was simply too unconventional for mainstream psychology of the time. 

When Neumann died in 1960, the two manuscripts were still unpublished. As the decades passed, perhaps few survivors in Neumann’s circle even remembered their existence. But thanks to a resurgence of interest in his work, initially spearheaded by a centennial celebration of his birth held in Israel in 2005 with the active support of his two adult children, these were translated from German into English--and with the aid of a team of prominent academicians and translators, published by Routledge in 2019.